Kitchen in Alameda takes food waste, turns it into meals for students, needy

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Pamela King, a kitchen apprentice who is participating in a six-month training and employment program at Food Shift in Alameda, prepares a meal. Food Shift, based at the Alameda Point Collaborative, takes in food waste from local groceries and has a food recovery partnership with Oakland public schools. (Sarah Tan/For Bay Area News Group)

ALAMEDA — About 30 percent of the food from groceries and restaurants is estimated to be wasted, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but one Alameda kitchen is doing its best to lower this number locally.

Food Shift, based at the Alameda Point Collaborative, has been working since 2012 to take in food that would otherwise be thrown out — like misshapen fruits and vegetables — and turn them into something useful.

“There’s a lot of food being wasted from farms and grocery stores,” Dana Frasz, founder and executive director of Food Shift said. “We capture as much of that as possible, and we bring it into the kitchen and we then spend all day sorting processing to pick out the good quality ones and we make the food into meals.”

The organization currently works to take in food waste from local groceries and even has a food recovery partnership with Oakland public schools. Frasz has been working to fix issues around food waste since she attended college in New York a decade ago. Since then however, she only saw issues of food waste and hunger intensifying.

“I saw these issues of food waste and hunger getting progressively worse and not better, and was really perplexed by that and motivated to dive in and figure out what’s wrong here, and how can we develop solutions,” she said.

Food Shift has since expanded to its own kitchen space at the Alameda Point Collaborative, and is now currently looking for volunteers to help out. It’s also looking to book groups interested in learning more about reducing food waste and having lunch at the Collaborative. Groups can book lunch spots and eat meals made with the vegetables the group collects.

Frasz said she got the idea to start Food Shift because she wanted to create an organization that addressed both issues of food waste and hunger in low income communities. She said she saw that tons of nutritious food was being wasted at groceries and restaurants, but that very little of that was going towards low-income communities, where in food deserts, people struggled to find quality vegetables and produce.

“We have to focus on nutrition and good health, we are adding fuel to the fire or diet-related diseases when we continue to provide low-income communities with bad food, we have to focus on nutrition,” she said. “And if we look at the available food in our communities, yes, there’s bad stuff, but what we need is more of the produce to get into our communities.”

She also acknowledges, however, that just providing a healthful meal isn’t the full answer.

“Hunger is a symptom of poverty and people need much more than food to solve hunger,” Frasz said.

In order to address other contributing factors to hunger, Food Shift is currently training members of the community to work in its kitchen in order to also provide employment and job training skills for those in need.

Food Shift is currently looking to raise $80,000 to expand their organization and is seeking kitchen volunteers available between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Those interested in volunteering can go to http://foodshift.net/get-involved/ or email volunteer@foodshift.net.

Email submissions to Kathy Bennett at kbennett@bayareanewsgroup.com. Congressional App Challenge continues this fall Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, is hosting the third annual Congressional App Challenge (CAC) for California’s 11th District, an app coding competition for U.S. high school students. Students who live or attend school in the district are invited to create and submit their own software application for mobile,...